Mystery solved: Cutting-edge technology reveals when mammals' ancestors became warm-blooded

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Mammals and birds produce their own body heat and control their body temperatures. This process is known as endothermy, or warm-bloodedness, and it may be one of the reasons why mammals tend to dominate almost every global ecosystem.

Warm-blooded animals are more active during both days and nights than their cold-blooded counterparts and they reproduce faster.

But until now it hasn't been known exactly when endothermy originated in mammalian ancestry. Our new study, just published in Nature, changes that.

A combination of scientists' intuition, fossils from South Africa's Karoo region and cutting-edge technology has provided the answer: endothermy developed in mammalian ancestors about 233 million years ago during the Late Triassic period.

The origin of mammalian endothermy has been one of the great unsolved mysteries of palaeontology.

Many different approaches have been used to try to pinpoint the answer but they have often given vague or conflicting results. We think our method shows real promise because it has been validated using a very large number of modern species.

It suggests that endothermy evolved at a time when many other features of the mammalian body plan were also falling into place.

Warm-bloodedness is the key to what makes mammals what they are today.

Endothermy was likely the starting point where mammalness evolved: the acquisition of an insulating fur coat; the evolution of a larger brain, supplied with warmer blood; a faster reproduction rate; and a more active life are all defining mammalian traits that evolved because of warm-bloodedness.

Until now, most scientists had speculated that the transition to endothermy was was a gradual, slow process over tens of millions of years beginning near